Hari Kondabolu’s Netflix special Warn Your Relatives brims with the kind of incisive political comedy one can expect from Kondabolu, the star, creator, and executive director of the pop culture documentary The Problem With Apu. There are digs at Trump, and self-aware attempts to stop talking about Trump that end in,…

The pointed and poignant commentary offered by stand-up comic Hari Kondabolu in his truTV documentary, The Problem With Apu, has elicited varied responses from the makers and one of the stars of The Simpsons. In his film, Kondabolu impaneled other Indian-American actors and comedians to explore the reductive…

Hari Kondabolu’s TruTV documentary The Problem With Apufirst aired last November, offering up a critical examination of The Simpsons’ hard-working Kwik-E-Mart operator, along with the various cultural factors, writing decisions, and acting choices that led a white man’s caricature of an Indian accent to become a…

Last year, comedian Hari Kondabolu released the documentary The Problem With Apu, in which he grapples with his lifelong love of The Simpsons—a show that was also the bane of his existence, along with so many other people of South Asian descent. In Kondabolu’s balanced, it-can-be-two-things critique, he examines how…

Lately, The Simpsons has been getting called out over Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, its Indian convenience-store employee character voiced by white guy Hank Azaria. The strength of this backlash is mostly due to writer-comedian Hari Kondabolu, who recently turned a fiery (and funny) monologue about Apu into a 50-minute…

No one wants to think that the pop culture they love doesn’t love them back, but that’s the situation in which people of color (any marginalized group, really) often find themselves. They’re underrepresented on screen, which makes every appearance significant—and all the more disappointing when their inclusion is…

“They haven’t seen the movie!” It’s Monday, November 5, and Hari Kondabolu is already having preemptive criticisms of his new truTV documentary, The Problem With Apu, lobbed at him on Twitter. “I don’t mind discussion, I don’t mind criticism, but watch the goddamn movie, then go after it.” The Problem With Apu,which…

The Simpsons’ Apu Nahasapeemapetilon is one of the most beloved Indian-American characters in all of American pop culture, standing as he does at the center of some of the most celebrated episodes of what’s widely considered to be one the greatest comedy series of all time. He’s also—as pointed out with varying levels…

For the past year or so, The A.V. Club has used its 11 Questionsfeature to ask celebrities about their first concerts and most embarrassing phases. Part of that feature—the 12th question—also asked the interviewee to come up with a question for the next interview subject without generally knowing who they were. Those…

Inventive and groundbreaking comedian Hari Kondabolu is back with a new stand-up record, Mainstream American Comic, due out July 22 on Kill Rock Stars. Recorded live at Mississippi Studios in Portland, Kondabolu’s record takes a funny but pointed look at race, gender, and politics, something that’s evident in the…

Rather than subject ourselves to the usual painstaking process of attaching points to comedy albums and specials this year (as we’ve done in years past), we’ve decided to simply provide you with a handy list of our favorites from 2014 and let you do the heavy lifting. It was a bigger year for up-and-comers than 2013,…